Sermon for the Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity, Choral Evensong
“Call no man happy before his death”
They are words of ancient wisdom that belong to the Jewish and the Greek and the Roman cultures of antiquity. Respice finem. Look to the end. They challenge our contemporary world, too. There is quite something wonderful and compelling about our readings from the Wisdom Literature of the Jewish Scriptures in tandem with the lesson from Matthew’s Gospel, something made even more wonderful and more compelling when they are seen within the context of the Octave of the Feast of All Saints’. They challenge us about how we understand ourselves.
To look to the end is wonderful wisdom if for no other reason than that it implies that there is an end in the sense of purpose and meaning. Wisdom is altogether about purpose and meaning, the idea that ennobles our humanity. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” In a way, T.S. Eliot’s questions simply echo the wisdom of Jesu ben Sirach, the ancient wisdom of Jew, Greek and Roman that are taken up and made part of the wisdom of Christians for every age. A world of bits and bytes of random facts and factlets disengaged from any context is information without knowledge. There is no wisdom in the Internet, only contextless information that can perhaps be shaped and formed into the beginnings of knowledge and wisdom. There is no wisdom in the knowledge that is a bare assemblage of facts and figures or of logical argument if there is no meaning.
